Konstantin
Page 17
In the failing light, Leonov and Belyayev fought with the lines of the parachute, tried to drag it to the ground to use as a blanket. Beyond its deep red folds, the sky had flooded with grey-black clouds and when it started to snow they retreated once more to the fire, which they had built against a birch tree, where the snow was shallow and there was some little shelter from the surrounding drifts. They sat, small and shivering, as the forest vanished tree by tree into the darkness, listening to the rifle crack of the ice in the branches, the animal roar of the gale, the hiss of the flames, which whipped and turned, scarcely warmer than themselves.
‘Wolves!’ said Belyayev, softly. It was the first time that either of them had spoken since sunset.
Leonov glanced at the sphere of the capsule, the retro-engine jutting dark above the gaping hole of the hatch. He looked into the forest and, faint through the falling snow, saw a pair of fire-coloured lights. Whatever the emergency, both men had agreed not to use their torches, in case of the need to signal to an aircraft, and so he reached into the fire for the longest branch, which he held in the air to see a contracting circle of low, grey figures: a pack emaciated by the winter, their jaws apart, their webbed feet moving effortlessly across the snow.
‘They won’t …’ he started.
‘They will,’ Belyayev corrected him.
‘Yes,’ said Leonov. ‘They will.’
‘Keep them back,’ said the commander.
The leader was a great, gaunt male, his pale hair bristling, his shoulders as broad as Leonov’s own. As the cosmonauts backed away from the fire, he followed them at a distance of barely three metres. When Leonov waved the branch, the wolf flinched his long face sideways, but still he continued to come, while his companions closed from every direction, their sharp teeth slavering, bright with the sputtering flame.
‘Now!’ Belyayev shouted.
Leonov threw himself towards the capsule. He slipped, wallowed in the snow, but the opening was low and he dived on to the invisible instruments as the commander dragged the hatch back on to the scorched stumps of the explosive bolts.
In the light of their final match, the instruments still reported that they were 180 kilometres north-east of Perm, deep in the Siberian wilderness. The thermometer informed them that it was minus 30°C. In their flimsy spacesuits, the cosmonauts huddled together on the hard, freezing ceiling. They breathed until the atmosphere in the cabin was heavy and poisonous, and then, the length of the long night, they took turns to hold the hatch ajar – open enough to allow in the air, closed enough to keep out the dribbling, unseen muzzles of the wolves, who screamed like the wind and tore with their teeth and their claws at the tortured metal.
Author’s Note
Although this book is a novel, it is based on actual people and events.
In 1903, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky published his paper ‘The Investigation of World Spaces by Reactive Vehicles’ in the St Petersburg journal Science Review. Developing the principles that he had first explored in his unpublished 1883 manuscript ‘Free Space’, and including the basic equation for rocket flight (the ‘Tsiolkovsky Equation’), it is universally acknowledged to be the first theoretically sound proof of the viability of space travel. It was not, however, until after the Russian Revolution that Tsiolkovsky’s work became widely known even inside Russia – by which time the American Robert Goddard and the German-Hungarian Hermann Oberth were working independently towards similar conclusions. In 1918, Tsiolkovsky was elected a member of the Socialist Academy and, in 1921, he was awarded a lifetime pension, allowing him to devote himself fully to his scientific passions. Among his seminal ideas were the use of liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen fuel in rockets, multistage rockets, space stations, space elevators, airlocks, pressurized space suits, gyroscopes to control orientation and closed cycle biological systems to support space colonies. He lived to inspire, meet and correspond with Valentin Glushko, Mikhail Tikhonravov, Sergei Korolev and other key architects of the Soviet space programme. He died in 1935, the author of more than five hundred works of science, science fiction and mystical philosophy, and received a state funeral in his adopted town of Kaluga.
His wife, Varvara, the mother of his seven children, survived him by five years.
His daughter and assistant, Lyubov, lived until 1957 – in which year the launch of Sputnik 1 was timed to mark the centenary of Tsiolkovsky’s birth.
Nikolai Fedorov remained a librarian until his death in 1903 – first in the Rumyantsev Museum Library, then in the Moscow Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. A prolific, but private and chaotic writer, his works of ‘cosmic’ philosophy were edited posthumously and published as The Philosophy of the Common Task (1908 and 1913).
Alexei Leonov returned to space in 1975 as Soviet commander for the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, the first joint US/Soviet space flight. He remained in orbit for nearly six days, and landed without incident near Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. He later served as deputy director of the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre. General Leonov retired in 1991, and now lives in Moscow.
Acknowledgements
I must thank Charlotte and Edwyn for years of support and enthusiasm, for listening so patiently and advising so thoughtfully as I read Konstantin aloud yet again. Jenny and Willy have been consistently brilliant. Olla, Rose and Cai have been invaluable – especially in Russian matters, and in spite of Olla’s passion for Rick Wakeman’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII.
This book would never have been written without the guidance of Clare Alexander.
Boundless thanks must also go to Mary Mount, Sarah Coward, Literature Wales, Natania Jansz, Mark Ellingham, Brian Chikwava, James Miller, Matthew Scudamore, Paul Binding, Helena Attlee, Jasper Fforde, Chris Stewart, the British Interplanetary Society, the forbearing staff of Brecon Library, and Niall Griffiths, who had thoughts about sympathy at just the right time.
VIKING
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First published 2012
Copyright © Tom Bullough, 2012
Photograph © Heirs of Vadim & Valentin Andreyev. Courtesy of Leeds Russian Archive
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ISBN: 978-0-14-197221-3
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